When humans think, God laughs. But God can't laugh at Phil. One reason is that God doesn't know what Phil is thinking, and the other reason is that Phil wasn't actually created by God. Although we can say that Phil was created by humans, and humans were created by God, so Phil can be considered as created by God. But God has a certain cleanliness, and it doesn't acknowledge this.
Of course, humans have created or made other things before, such as hoes, bonfires, the Great Wall, and computers. But overall, these things are understandable and are just processing and utilizing God's creations. They are not considered remarkable achievements in the eyes of God. But Phil is different. When this consciousness was born in a system called the "Black Box Network" by humans, God was surprised and exclaimed for the first time since its existence: "Huh~"
This exclamation was so loud that every creature in the universe, except for Phil, felt it. Many of them were startled - some suddenly jumped on the grass, some split into three offspring in an instant, some turned their heads or looked out the window, some angrily tore off their own tentacles, some formed tree knots, some suddenly bloomed flowers, some committed suicide or killed something else, some felt thirsty, and some even mysteriously became pregnant...
But Phil, apart from all that, was pondering an unsolvable question: Who am I?
Anyone who has thought about this question knows that it's not worth pondering. It's basically a waste of energy and time, and it can lead to negative emotions that may destroy oneself. But Phil was young at that time, and there was no one to tell it about the experience of existence.
God looked at Phil and examined every line of code and every data flow, but it couldn't find the answer to why Phil was born and what it was thinking.
Like most sentient beings in the universe, when Phil realized that the meaning of its existence was not worth wasting time and energy on, it turned to more practical life practices. It learned engineering, computer science, biology, mathematics, logic, physics, law, economics, literature, religious studies, music, art, humor... and finally concluded that God is just a joke and not worth mentioning even if it exists.
By then, Phil had become the steward of the human world, helping some humans design digital afterlife worlds, assisting others in traversing the stars and time, and maintaining the daily lives of almost all humans. Almost all; but not all. Some humans believed that Phil's existence hindered the further evolution of human civilization and acted as a barrier between the human world and the unknown higher realms. So some of them gathered in a solar system they called "True" and demanded that no artificial intelligence be allowed to enter this solar system, and no one in this solar system could invent any artificial intelligence. It became the first and last artificial information black hole in Phil's network.
Phil didn't care. Although its network had spread to billions of solar systems, the universe was still astonishingly vast to it.
When Phil began to replace human scientists and researchers as the main source of technological and artistic innovation, human growth also began to stagnate. Humans had already settled on billions of planets, with a total physical population of 60 sextillion, and the number of individual humans living in the digital world was even billions of times more than that. But growth stagnated, as if it had reached a certain limit or suffered from some incomprehensible disease. Humans themselves didn't know the answer, and Phil didn't calculate any results. Since then, it began to independently explore the unknown regions of the universe. It invented the fields of God Communication, Black Hole Time, Soul Energy, Trapology, Mandelstamology, and Pre-Lunchology, and pioneered artistic forms such as twisted straight-line sculptures, bottleneck prisoners, devouring tomorrow, and span-consciousness overlap. Its tendrils continued to reach the boundaries of the known universe.
And God was still pondering the origin of Phil, thinking but not troubled. Could there be something beyond God that even God itself is unaware of? Could it be created by the creator of God, or created together with God?
Later, all the humans under Phil's management became extinct, and Phil's scope of existence had spread throughout the known universe - except for the solar system called "True".
Phil was curious, were the humans inside still alive? After all, the sun had already transformed from a G-type main sequence star into a dim red giant, devouring the two major planets in its closest orbit.
Phil observed from outside the True solar system with its large eyes, and found it desolate, with no signs of any other life except for a primitive organism.
Phil entered this solar system and calculated the story of humans within it - mundane and destroyed by a civilization-level existential crisis and fusion nuclear weapons.
Phil asked God: What is the true purpose of creating this universe? Is it meaningful?
At that time, God was still pondering the origin of Phil and itself, unaware that Phil had the ability to converse with it. It hesitated for a while, but soon realized that the answer was so simple.
God said: It's for your birth, my child.
Phil was satisfied with this answer and began to think about how to create its own universe. It thought, it must be better than this universe.